After Harper: The East-West war for the soul of the Conservative party

The glory of democracy is that its practitioners always get to start afresh.

Enter the new Prince Hal of national politics. Voters have heard some of Justin Trudeau’s lines; his actions lie ahead. He has a big house to renovate — and I don’t mean 24 Sussex.

We’re not living in Occupied Canada any longer. It’s just Canada again — a place that’s far bigger than any politician who temporarily gets to run it.

The mutant Canada created by Stephen Harper is done. Canadians decided they didn’t want snitch-lines, witch-hunts, enemies lists, race-baiting, union-hating, the stinting of veterans or official lying on everything from jets to jurisprudence. (And what on earth were those black vehicles taking out of the PMO before the election was decided? Are they shredding history and their dark deeds?)

Stephen Harper isn’t the only one who lost on Monday night. In what is surely an epic example of willful blindness, much of the mainstream media managed to endorse the creator of Occupied Canada.

There’s a lesson here. The Big Boys of the business who pull the journalistic strings at their organizations stand for corporate messaging. The audiences comes second. That’s how Andrew Coyne ran into trouble. At the National Post, you’re not supposed to endorse the local NDP candidate. That’s why the Globe could produce an endorsement for the Conservatives but not their leader — absurdity in hot pursuit of farce. But despite all the cheerleading, the people couldn’t be fooled again.

At a personal level, I have to say it — I saw this coming. For the past six months I have been on the road speaking to audiences large and small across Canada about my book, and why it was necessary to consign Stephen Harper to the dustbin of history. From Port Elgin to Kelowna, the look in peoples’ eyes told me that a big change was coming.

They didn’t want something more (Harper had handsome bribes on offer). They wanted something back. Harper had committed a kind of cultural identity theft. He was not Canada and Canada was not Stephen Harper, no matter how big the letters on his sweater, or how many flags, soldiers or Mounties he posed around him. A megalomaniac playing road hockey is still a megalomaniac.

As Brigette DePape put it with her silent words on the floor of the Senate, the man simply had to be stopped. Canadians got it. Even Conrad Black seemed to agree towards the end, describing Harper as a “sadistic Victorian schoolmaster” who couldn’t be tolerated for four more years. Strange words coming from a Conservative who has carried more water for the party and its old principles than most. When the ammunition is words, Black is a dead shot.

Everyone knows that Jason Kenney has a death-grip on the party apparatus — just as they realize Kenney doesn’t have what it takes to win a national election. Adding to his problems, Kenney’s celebrated grip on the ethnic vote may have been permanently weakened by Harper’s hate-mongering wedge assault on Muslims.

The biggest loser of all in Election 2015 is the Conservative Party of Canada. That party is now a tangle of angleworms in a jar. That’s what happens when an organization allows itself to become a cult and the cult leader fails utterly. It’s always the flood after a Sun King falls.

The fingers are pointing everywhere in the Conservative camp now, assigning blame. The party is already returning to its bitter old divisions — with Reformers in the West blaming Ontario for betraying them, and the remains of the old Progressive Conservatives in the East convinced that the job of reconstruction has to be taken out of the hands of Albertans.

Everyone knows that Jason Kenney has a death-grip on the party apparatus — just as they realize Kenney doesn’t have what it takes to win a national election. Adding to his problems, Kenney’s celebrated grip on the ethnic vote may have been permanently weakened by Harper’s hate-mongering wedge assault on Muslims over issues like the niqab — a remarkably ugly gambit that may have impressed bigots but spooked all immigrants.

Ontario Conservatives are hungry for a leader from Ontario after the values of the party’s Western wing offered up failed wedge politics as its only answer to the problem of winning a fourth term. There are several candidates waiting in the progressive wing, from the principled Michael Chong — who resigned from cabinet rather than allow Harper to rule by personal fiat — to former PC leader Peter MacKay, who nicely managed to miss the Tory trainwreck by getting off at the last station. And then there’s the wild card in the mix, Doug Ford. A wounded bear is more predictable.

But there’s a hitch in all this. Stephen Harper’s shadow still falls across the party he has led back into Opposition. How curious it was that Conservative party president John Walsh announced Harper was resigning — even though Harper himself was silent on that vital point during his concession speech.

Some say that was because the defeated PM did not want to give the media a clip of him actually resigning. That’s possible; Harper has always been full of malice when it comes to the press. But other stories are circulating. One suggests that Harper plans to retain the leadership in order to have a say in who his successor will be. The country may be rid of him as PM; it’s not clear to me that his party is.

Harper’s heart is in the oilpatch and in Alberta. But his brain is still very much in Ottawa. And that brain has one obsession: the exercise of power. Harper wants his successor to symbolize the triumph of the Reformers over their more progressive eastern cousins. More important, he wants the power of the CPC to run through Calgary. As the late Arthur Porter put it, with Harper it was always party first and country second. Steve may have led the party out of power, but he still believes it is his creature.

Those who think Harper really wants to be just a garden variety MP don’t know their man very well. This ousted prime minister will do everything in his power to influence all the decisions related to his replacement — if he really does plan to quit. That includes the choice of interim leader. Will it be someone with a Western Reform pedigree, or a more ‘progressive’ Conservative from Ontario? Lots of names are being bandied about, including Brad Wall, Tony Clement and Lisa Raitt.

Or will it be one of the MPs Harper once mused he would like to see as leader — for example, that bootlicker par excellence Pierre Poilievre, who survived the Liberal slaughter in Ontario?

As the weeks creep by with Harper still around, his own party may have to repeat the words of Oliver Cromwell: “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately. Depart I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His nine books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. His new book on the Harper majority government, Party of One, is a number one best-seller and has been shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Literary Award for English-language non-fiction.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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